The present invention relates in general to educational devices, and more particularly to a device which is capable of audibly stating questions and responding to manually-inputted answers to those questions with an audible indication of whether the selected answer is correct or incorrect.
Advances in electronics have motivated the design and development of an entirely-new field of educational devices for use by people of all ages. In particular, it has been recognized that children are capable of understanding and learning many subjects with relative ease even at a very-young age if properly motivated. Accordingly, efforts have been made toward the design and development of educational toys which not only serve as a means for amusement of young children, but also provide an educational aspect to their play which leads to an early learning of basic information in many subjects.
Many of the educational devices which are now being developed rely on the use of microprocessors and other complex electronic circuitry which not only provides a complex operating procedure, but also considerably increases the cost of such devices to the consumer. Unfortunately, the more complex devices which require intricate procedures for operation of the device cannot be used by younger children not only because they are incapable of performing such complex operations, but because such devices tend to lose the interest of the younger player rather quickly in view of the tedious and/or complicated operating requirements thereof.
Thus, devices have been proposed as amusement/hearing instruments which audibly reproduce questions from a magnetic tape and respond to a manually-inputted answer with an audible response which indicates whether the selected answer was correct or incorrect. Such a device is disclosed, for example, in the Freeman U.S. Pat. No. 3,947,972. However, all of these systems are characterized by the fact that the recorded questions and a response to each possible answer to the question are provided in separate tracks on the magnetic tape and selection buttons for answer selection are provided for direct selection, either electrically or mechanically, of one of the tracks on the magnetic tape for reproduction of the question and/or a selected answer.
The obvious disadvantage with these systems is the need for multiple tracks on the magnetic tape which not only provides for poor efficiency in the use of the tape insofar as the storage capacity thereof is concerned, but also limits the number of possible answers to be selected for each question. The result is a system which is complex, expensive, inefficient and may require a tape unit of special construction.